Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, the German government is considering legal measures to keep hate speech off social media, Apple has been found guilty of iPhone price fixing in Russia, Netflix has hired Hollywood producer Scott Stuber to help grow its movie division and more.

German justice minister Heiko Maas has proposed a new anti-hate-speech law that could see social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter hit by penalties of up to €50m (£44m) if they fail to remove illegal racist and xenophobic content (The Guardian). Maas said that he's proposing the law due to the failure of voluntary measures adopted by social media companies in Germany, which he said have "proved insufficient, and (illegal posts) are not being deleted quickly enough". The draft law, which will have to be approved by the German cabinet and parliament, states that social networks must provide a clear and easy method of reporting hate speech, that reports should be reviewed quickly, and that illegal content should be deleted within 24 hours. Meanwhile, in the UK, Facebook has said that it's tweaked its community standards review system in response to the discovery of child sexual abuse content on its platform, which was not removed when BBC investigative journalists reported it.

Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service - the country's antitrust watchdog - has announced that Apple has been found guilty of fixing the price of iPhones in Russia for years (The Verge). The FAS says that if local retailers attempted to lower the price at which they sold iPhones, Apple would first request that they change the price back, and, if they didn't do go, terminate their contract. Apple reportedly has three months to appeal against the ruling and stands to be fined up to 15 per cent of the value of its Russian sales. However, the regulator said that Apple has cooperated with the investigation and ended its price fixing practices, putting in place protocols and training to prevent it from happening again.

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Google is getting serious about hardware, but it won't win easily

ByMatthew Reynolds

Netflix has hired Hollywood producer Scott Stuber to help it gain traction with the traditional motion picture industry (Engadget). Although the streaming media firm received its first Academy Award this year, for short Syrian war documentary The White Helmets, it hasn't won the same favour with the Hollywood establishment as rival Amazon, largely due to its emphasis on streaming, rather than theatrical releases. Stuber, known for films including Battleship and Ted has been brought in to help bridge that gap, and to aid filmmakers in developing movies with the streaming platform in mind. The company has also acquired the rights to Orson Welles' unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, which it plans to complete with the aid of original cast and crew including lead actor Peter Bogdanovich and production manager Frank Marshall.

A team of Google DeepMind and Imperial College London researchers has created an algorithm that allows neural networks to learn, retain the information, and use it again (WIRED). "Previously, we had a system that could learn to play any game, but it could only learn to play one game," James Kirkpatrick, a research scientist at DeepMind and the lead author of its new research paper, tells WIRED. "Here we are demonstrating a system that can learn to play several games one after the other". The paper, Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, explains how DeepMind's AI can learn in sequences using supervised learning and reinforcement learning tests. "Our approach remembers old tasks by selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks," the paper says. Kirkpatrick explains that the algorithm selects what it learned to successfully play one game and keeps the most useful parts. "We only allow them to change very slowly," he says. "That way there is room to learn the new task but the changes we've applied do not override what we've learned before".

Chile is set to become the home of a revolutionary solar thermal power plant, capable of generating electricity even during the hours of darkness (Ars Technica). The Tamarugal Solar Energy Project is to consist of three 150 megawatt solar thermal towers, heated by an array of mirrors placed around them to focus sunlight on each tower. That heat energy is transferred to molten salt - a combination of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate kept at 566 degrees Celsius - which will circulate around the plant's heat exchangers during the day and be stored in tanks at night. Because the molten salt holds heat so effectively, in dark or cloudy conditions it can be pumped back to the thermal towers, where it will generate electricity by super-heading water to move a traditional steam turbine. The plant, designed by US firm SolarReserve, will be able to able to provide 450 MW of power continuously, and as much as 2,600 GWh annually.

A new study published in The Journal of Pediatrics has cast doubt on the effectiveness of parental controls and content filters as a means of protecting teenagers online (The Register). Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University analysed Ofcom data on 515 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15, and found that the use of content filters in the home - in use in a third of the households involved - "did not appear to mitigate the risk of young people having unpleasant online experiences and that technical ability to bypass these filters had no observed effect on the likelihood of such experiences". The researchers instead suggest that the best way to protect young people from having adverse experiences online would be to provide education and support to help them use the internet responsibly.

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Transmitting from London to the WIRED World

ByGreg Williams

A laser-based gyroscope has been buried deep in Earth’s core to measure the rotation of our planet (WIRED). The ambitious experiment, described in a new paper in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, should be precise enough to reveal the effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity. A group from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics' (INFN) Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) has created a prototype of the underground experiment. The setup will measure the precession Earth undergoes due to a relativistic effect called the Lense-Thirring effect. When a massive object like the Earth rotates, it effectively drags space and time around itself. "This effect is detectable as a small difference between the Earth's rotation rate value measured by a ground-based observatory, and the value measured in an inertial reference frame," said Jacopo Belfi, lead author of the paper.

Nintendo has released a half hour long documentary in threeparts, going into intimate detail about the origins and development of Nintendo Switch hit The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Eurogamer). The documentaries include interviews, art and footage of the game's prototypes, and provide glimpses of unused concepts such as a 2.5D version of the game and the return of the pint-sizes Picori race from The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.

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System Shock 3, Otherside Entertainment's planned sequel to Looking Glass Technologies' seminal action RPGs of the '90s, has signed a publishing detail with Sweden's Starbreeeze Studios (RockPaperShotgun). The move means that the game, developed by Warren Spector, the legendary industry figure behind the original System Shock and Deus Ex games, will be coming to "PC and other platforms" thanks to a $12 million investment from Starbreeze. Otherside CEO Paul Neurath, himself a veteran designer and director behind titles including Ultima Underworld and Thief: The Dark Project said: “We are thrilled to be partnering with Starbreeze for System Shock 3. They truly get games and gamers, and have been able to translate that understanding into a robust publishing business, and build thriving gaming communities around their franchises”.

Primal Rage II - sequel to post-apocalyptic one-on-one beast fighting arcade and console hit Primal Rage - never saw an official release, but is now available to play thanks to a tweaked version of the MAME emulator created by Urthrage fansite owner Gruntzilla94 (Kotaku).The emulator can be downloaded for Windows as a set of three 7-Zip files, although you'll need to find and download the game ROMs separately for legal reasons. Primal Rage II, although incomplete and never officially released, was discovered in an arcade in 2014, but this is the first time it's been successfully emulated on home computers.

London fintech startup TransferWise, which provides direct international money transfer services at extremely competitive rates, has teamed up with UK-based, digital-only Starling Bank in a partnership aimed at providing easier and cheaper international money transfers. Launching in the UK this summer, the service will enable Starling's customers to make transfers from the UK in the 35 currencies available in TransferWise's service app, including the euro, US dollars, Indian rupees and Australian dollars.